Seattle: Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it is bringing one of its most popular apps, which lets people take photos of a document and turn it into a editable file, to Apple Inc`s iPhone and Google Inc`s Android.
The app, called Office Lens, is already available on phones running Windows, but has had little exposure given Windows` minute share of the smartphone market.
Bringing the app to iOS and Android is the latest sign of Microsoft`s new strategy of putting its best software on as many devices as possible, regardless of whether they are running Windows.
Office Lens essentially turns a phone into a scanner, using the camera to take a photo of a menu, receipt or business card, for example, and instantly cropping the image and storing it in Microsoft`s OneNote note-taking app, or OneDrive cloud storage app.
The app, which is free to download on both iOS and Android phones as of Thursday, can save an image as a Word file, PowerPoint presentation or PDF file, and uses optical character recognition to make the text searchable and ready for editing.